Pique'n'yer interest

Death or taxes

Hubert Humphrey once said “the moral test of a government is
how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in
the twilight of life; the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the
sick and the needy, and the handicapped.”

It’s a pretty good quote to describe how society failed the
26 women that Robert Pickton is accused of murdering, and the two Fraser Valley
women that Davey Mato Butorac was accused of murdering just last week. Same goes
for all the prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless, and hopeless that have been
killed or died of unnatural causes in every city across Canada.

Our current policy — ignoring our most vulnerable citizens,
prosecuting them for their addictions and the laws they break out of
desperation, and blaming them for their plight — clearly isn’t working. It
isn’t even saving us tax dollars, which is the main reason social programs are
so poorly under funded these days. It’s been proven countless times and in countless
ways that the cost of doing nothing always costs us more in the long run.

Take the Pickton case. According to recent articles, the
investigation cost roughly $70 million, while the first trial that successfully
charged Pickton with six murders cost another $46 million. If a defence appeal
of the original convictions is successful the Crown will retry Pickton for all
26 murders, essentially throwing the first convictions out and bringing the
total cost of the case to more than $130 million. That doesn’t cover the
appeal, or the cost of jailing Pickton for the rest of his life.

Now imagine if we spent that $130 million on the women that
were murdered. Not that we should ever put a dollar value on human lives, but
that works out to about $5 million per victim.

Consider that none of Pickton’s victims willingly chose
prostitution, but were reduced to it by their addictions, and in many cases by
the people who kept them addicted.

What if we put some of that money into social housing, so
they would have a place to sleep at night, and programs to protect
streetwalkers from brutal pimps? What if we put some money into addiction
recovery programs to get them healthy, and then spent a little more to help
them become educated and find jobs? What if we had social workers that knew
their names and addresses, their addictions, and the people they associated
with — would all those years have still gone by before anyone even noticed they
were missing? Maybe Pickton would have been caught long before he became
Canada’s worst serial killer.